Counter-Clockwise, Like a Hurricane

     I want to plug a new blog I started, one about movies, called Screen Screed: Thoughts On Movies From a Lifelong Eater of Cinema by Vic Neptune.  It's a nice alternative for me, giving me a chance to write about a subject I'm very interested in that doesn't have to do with current events or politics, which still get dealt with in One Damned Thing After Another, this particular blog that's existed since November 2014.
     2014, the year before the presidential campaigns for 2016 started.  2018 will be its equivalent, in terms of not hearing about politicians being moved around the country to say shit to people who need to see such power-mongers in person.  One can, like with football games, watch and hear such shit on TV, not having to be around crowds of people willing to be frisked and electronically checked for weapons before entering a venue to see their preferred man or, sometimes, woman.
     Remember Carly Fiorina?  I remember that she seemed pretty hostile to abortion.  As a Republican candidate who, like many others, lost to Donald Trump and was insulted by him, Fiorina also loved the American war machine.  She ended up doing badly enough with the voters that her declining self-esteem led her to accept Senator Ted Cruz's offer to be his running mate, after a presumed win of the nomination.  Cruz was Trump's last opponent before the self-described billionaire won the nomination and then the election.  Fiorina dropped out of sight for a while, but was seen at Trump Tower interviewing with the President-Elect for the job of Director of National Intelligence (DNI).
     Why would Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett Packard, be qualified to head the nation's intelligence community?  For the same reason, perhaps, that Trump's son-in-law acts as a peace envoy to the Middle East.  That the jobs don't match the characters and abilities of those in the Trump administration starts with the President himself.  He has no government experience, and what he's done with that experience since January reveals an incompetent who prevents any real work getting done in the Executive Branch because his politics are based on personalities with all the whining bitchiness accompanying that; a key feature of American culture in a time of growing social media and "reality" shows on TV as well as this nation's own self-regard as a great and perfect country that cannot do wrong.
     Trump, in an attention-grabbing interview last year, said that Carly Fiorina's face disqualified her for the presidency.  "Look at her!"  She wasn't good-looking enough, I guess.  She should look like Cindy Crawford.  Had he declared, "I'm a misogynist!" would that have made any difference? Trump's own ugly face didn't prevent him from winning over enough voters to give him a job he can't handle, proving that there is a double standard and voters' judgments of character are generally inaccurate.
     In 2019 the shit show will start again, and Trump, maybe, won't even be President then.  Talk of his supposedly soon-to-happen resignation "in disgrace" is increasingly heard in news media, independent and mainstream.  I'm not convinced of this, yet.  Consider how Trump has managed to survive a multitude of supposedly "this is the end for him" scandals, all of which tend to clash with each other.  He's proved that dishonorably insulting a war hero can be done by a presidential candidate.  He's proved that attacking the mother of a war hero and insulting her religion at the same time can be done.  He's proved that proposing a ban on all Muslims from entering the United States won't get him dismissed from American public life forever.  He's proved that siding with neo-Nazis and the KKK won't reduce significantly his popularity among the America First right wing.  The problem with Trump is that his ideas about the United States having the right to dominate and murder and exploit other peoples and nations is not out of the mainstream of American political thought, i.e., American exceptionalism, believed in by nearly every politician and corporate news media representative.
     Trump's mistake for many in politics isn't that he's pro-war and pro-national security state, it's that he talks about these subjects in such a vulgar way.  He talked last year about "taking" Iraq's oil.  This caused a furor in the mainstream press, even though that was the main point of Bush's 2003 invasion and everybody knows this.  He's spoken recently about exploiting Afghanistan's undeveloped mineral wealth, something that could yield trillions of dollars in precious metals.  Colonel Jack Jacobs, an MSNBC contributor on military affairs, used the word "removing" that wealth, a "nice" way to talk about it, even though what he really meant is theft of a sovereign nation's natural resources, making America, if this is ever accomplished, a robber of epic proportions, with accompanying bloodshed.  But that's what this and other powerful nations have always done--stolen and killed and devastated less powerful nations.
     Trump's "tone" offends his establishment critics, as when he told Bill O'Reilly that "We [America] kill people."  It's true, but he got skewered by pundits and politicians for saying that.  The U.S. Army in 1945 forced German citizens to see piles of dead bodies, victims of Hitler's reign.  The political and news establishments of America have, in just one example, the Iraq War and around a million dead people to serve as a reminder of the truth of Trump's statement about how the U.S. kills people.  Still, they deny it, in an age of mass communications.  Josef Goebbels and Hitler may have envied the smooth workings of America's current propaganda machine--one that succeeds mostly at not allowing American citizens from being concerned about how their government, using taxpayer money, commits mass murder as a daily habit.  Trump's blunt statement offended the shit out of establishment journalists, pundits, and politicians, the same elite people in the business of concealing the magnitude of the truth about the dark side of American glory.
     Trump is the proverbial "crazy uncle" at the dinner table, talking about subjects no one in polite society mentions.  Trump and I differ in how we view the morality of these concerns.  I'm against the U.S. military operations that fuck with other countries.  Trump has no problem with dropping a 22,000 pound bomb on Afghanistan--I think it's reckless and evil.
     Donald Trump's "Russia connections" mean far less to me than the general establishment viewpoint that what America does in the world, to the world, is good for the world, especially the most vulnerable caught in zones of first world mismanagement and warfare.  That kind of shit doesn't get criticized on the news in the mainstream media.  I don't hear politicians on the floors of House and Senate crying out against American exceptionalism and the damage that does to peace and security in our own country, a nation that can't get its shit together to the extent that the poisoned poor people of Flint, Michigan still deal with state government criminality; that the minimum wage is still an insult, that health care hasn't been improved to the level of decency enjoyed by first world countries, and no one in government or corporate news media seem to care that climate change will, a century from now, make Earth into an alien planet.

                                                                            Vic Neptune